A Grain of Sand.
A massive leap in computing power.
“The first news summary of the morning —the most comprehensive I’ll receive all day— and the last thing I read before going on air.” — Hugh Hewitt, host of The Hugh Hewitt Show.
1. A remote-controlled robot the size of a grain of sand can swim through blood vessels to deliver drugs before dissolving into the body. The technology could allow doctors to administer small amounts of drugs to specific sites, avoiding the toxic side effects of body-wide therapies. The microrobots — guided by magnetic fields — work in blood vessels in pigs and sheep, researchers showed in a paper published in Science on 13 November. The system has yet to be trialled in people, but it shows promise because it works in a roughly human-sized body, and because all its components have already been shown to be biocompatible, says Bradley Nelson, a mechanical engineer at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, who co-led the work. (Source: nature.com)
2. Stephen Roach:
Affordability is about the price level, not the rate of change of prices. Disinflation, or a decelerating rate of change in inflation is a good thing, especially for inflation-targeting central banks. But even in a disinflation, prices keep rising, providing no relief to the fundamental problem of pocket-book distress known as affordability. Moreover, with the lagged impacts of tariffs now largely responsible for most of the reacceleration of headline CPI inflation from the April low of 2.3% to the latest reading of 3.0% in pre-shutdown September, the price-level affordability issue is once again going from bad to worse. And these pressures are likely to persist, with further tariff-related increases still in the pipeline. (Sources: jackson.yale.edu, substack.com)
3. Torsten Slok:
In 2010, the median age of all US homebuyers was 39 years old. Today, it is 59, see chart below.
(Sources: bloomberg.com, apolloacademy.com)
4. For the second straight year, about one in five Americans say they would like to leave the U.S. and move permanently to another country if they could. This heightened desire to migrate is driven primarily by younger women. In 2025, 40% of women aged 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. The current figure is four times higher than the 10% who shared this desire in 2014, when it was generally in line with other age and gender groups. The sharp rise in younger women wanting to leave the U.S. has created a large gender gap between them and their male counterparts. Today’s 21-percentage-point gap between younger men (19%) and women (40%) wanting to leave the U.S. is the widest Gallup has recorded on this trend. (Source: news.gallup.com)
5. The 17-point drop in the percentage of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life — from 66% in 2015 to 49% today — ranks among the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007. About half of Americans now say religion is not an important part of their daily life. They remain as divided on the question today as they were last year. Such large declines in religiosity are rare. Since 2007, only 14 out of more than 160 countries in the World Poll have experienced drops of over 15 percentage points in religious importance over any 10-year period. (Source: news.gallup.com)
6. Africa’s population has doubled in three decades and it’s now home to about 1.5 billion people, a figure that’s predicted to grow to 4 billion by the turn of the century. This growth has been driven by improved access to medical care, plummeting infant mortality since 1990, and persistently high birth rates. Already about 60% of people south of the Sahara desert are younger than 25, compared with one-third in the US, according to the United Nations. The expected number of annual births in Congo is more than 800,000 greater than across the US or the European Union’s 27 member states. So while the developed world worries about getting old, Africa is getting younger. Read the rest. (Source: bloomberg.com)
7. Paul Kedrosky newsletter:
The number of babies born in China dropped from 33 million in 1963 to just 9 million in 2024—a decline of over 70% in six decades. (Source: paulkedrosky.com)
8. China’s economic activity cooled more than expected at the start of the fourth quarter, with an unprecedented slump in investment and slower growth in industrial output adding to a drag from sluggish consumption. Fixed-asset investment shrank 1.7% in the first 10 months of the year, a record decline for the period, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Friday. Bloomberg Economics estimates investment dropped as much as 12% in October, extending its streak of declines into a fifth straight month. (Source: bloomberg.com)
9. China has achieved a massive leap in computing power, spearheaded by a new optical quantum chip capable of accelerating complex problem-solving by over a thousandfold. The photonic quantum chip won the “Leading Technology Award” at the 2025 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit last week – one of 17 scientific achievements honored from more than 400 candidates across 34 countries at the technology gathering. (Source: scmp.com)
10. Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings is laying the groundwork for what many see as the next frontier of artificial intelligence by investing in “world models” that simulate the physical environment, according to its head of 3D generation and world modelling. China’s most valuable tech conglomerate joins a fast-growing cohort that includes Google DeepMind and Elon Musk’s xAI in exploring “spatial intelligence”, which some experts have described as “AI’s next great frontier”. On Wednesday, AI pioneer Li Fei-Fei’s new spatial intelligence start-up, World Labs, launched its first commercial world-model product, Marble. (Sources: scmp.com, drfeifei.substack.com, techcrunch.com)
11. China’s state-sponsored hackers used artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic to automate break-ins of major corporations and foreign governments during a September hacking campaign, the company said Thursday. The effort focused on dozens of targets and involved a level of automation that Anthropic’s cybersecurity investigators had not previously seen, according to Jacob Klein, the company’s head of threat intelligence. Hackers have been using AI for years now to conduct individual tasks such as crafting phishing emails or scanning the internet for vulnerable systems, but in this instance 80% to 90% of the attack was automated, with humans only intervening in a handful of decision points, Klein said. The hackers conducted their attacks “literally with the click of a button, and then with minimal human interaction.” (Source: wsj.com)
12. After about two years of striking Russian units with near impunity, Ukraine’s scrappy, innovative drone pilots have become the hunted. Their tormentor is a dynamic new Russian unit known as Rubikon. Using sophisticated tools and its own fleet of hunter drones, the team has been locating, tracking and killing Ukrainian operators before they can launch. “It’s easy to replace a drone, but it’s hard to replace a drone pilot,” said Dmytro, who was a successful rapper before the war. Rubikon’s emergence has driven a chilling reversal on the digital battlefield, overturning one of Kyiv’s biggest tactical advantages. Its success has piled pressure on Ukraine’s army already on the back foot against the more numerous and better-funded Russians. (Source: ft.com)
13. Germany will build a database of young people detailing their fitness, aptitude and outlook to help it pick whom to draft should the country be attacked. The proposed move, a step toward reintroducing military conscription, comes as countries across Europe grapple with how to repopulate their armed forces under pressure from Washington and an expansionist Russia that European capitals accuse of waging a hybrid war on the continent. The decision to test all 18-year-old males for their fighting abilities starting next year underlines how rapidly European countries, including those with a post-World War II tradition of pacifism, are getting war-ready in an effort to deter Russia. (Source: wsj.com)
14. The largest city in Alaska is about to undertake an experiment that feels both inevitable and impossibly futuristic in an era of pervasive mistrust toward elections: allowing all voters to cast ballots from their smartphones. Anchorage, home to about 240,000 registered voters, is starting small. Mail and in-person voting will still exist, but voters will also be able to open a link on their phones to cast a ballot in municipal races in April, when six city assembly seats and two school board seats are up for election. The change will not apply to higher-profile races later in the year for state legislature, governor and federal offices. But even at the local level, the trial run of phone voting — one of the first of its scale in the nation — could offer a blueprint for expanded use in future elections beyond Alaska. (Source: nytimes.com)
15. Katie Wilson, a socialist, community organizer and first-time candidate who pushed for higher taxes on the wealthy, will be Seattle’s next mayor, unseating the incumbent, Bruce Harrell, who conceded on Thursday following one of the tightest elections in the city’s history. Ms. Wilson’s election is a Pacific Coast victory for progressive Democrats that matches Zohran Mamdani’s rise in New York City. (Source: nytimes.com)
New ‘Night Owls’ podcast! Joe Klein and I talked with Cade Metz, Silicon Valley tech correspondent for The New York Times and author of ‘Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World’. The link to the podcast is here. He’s great.
Quick Links: How markets could topple the global economy. Verizon to cut about 15,000 jobs as new CEO restructures, source says. Employers have a warning for the Class of 2026: Next spring’s graduate-hiring market is likely to be even worse than this year’s. Florida is running a radical experiment in education. Well-reported piece on the Texas water wars. Classic News Items quick link: Toxic ‘hammerhead worm’ is invading Texas. Pats fever grips Hub.
Financialization Links: Private credit is now infrastructure finance for AI (and defense and energy). Paramount, Comcast, Netflix prepare bids for Warner as deadline approaches. Michael Burry of ‘Big Short’ fame is closing his hedge fund.
Political Links: Penn Station stands as a symbol of a condition that afflicts so many attempts to get big things done in America: inertia. U.S. plans to eliminate tariffs on bananas, coffee, beef and certain apparel and textile products. The Justice Department is suing California over its new congressional map for the 2026 midterm elections. Gerry Baker: Cracks are showing in Trump’s Maga coalition. Democrats eye Trump country for a special election surprise. (Ed. Note: If past is prologue: call the “surprise” unlikely). News Items help desk: The Epstein Document Search. Iraq election results set stage for a long power struggle.
Science/Technology Links: Impressive: MIT startup aims to expand America’s lithium production. Wild new “gyromorph” materials could make computers insanely fast. The AI surveillance state isn’t coming. It’s here. Flexible power use by US data centers is fiction, report says. This Reuters profile of Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is worth reading in full. Google DeepMind introduces SIMA 2, “a significant step in the direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)”. Anthropic’s Claude takes control of a robot dog. ‘Tiny’ AI model beats massive LLMs at logic test. CRISPR vs cholesterol: can gene editing prevent heart disease? Lifelong drugs for autoimmune diseases don’t work well. Now scientists are trying something new. Scientists identify neurons driving anxiety – and how to calm them. News Items founder’s shrink.
War: Xi Jinping’s purge of military officers raises doubts about China’s readiness for war. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated that the Kremlin remains unwilling to compromise on its long-held maximalist war aims that amount to Ukraine’s complete capitulation. Ukraine’s dilemma as a city teeters: Save lives or keep holding on. A vast militarization of Russia’s education system is gathering pace in classrooms. Hegseth announces Operation Southern Spear in “America’s neighborhood”. U.S. WWII cemetery in the Netherlands removes displays about Black troops. Gaza’s zombie ceasefire. Ethiopia is perilously close to another war.